KUNSTENPLATFORM PLAN B

Bert Villa

Memory Landscape

In his practice, artist-architect Bert Villa openly questions his surroundings. Which environmental elements characterise our society? How did these habits come about? How do we view tradition and the past? By removing objects from their familiar context, Bert wants to create space for interpretation and reflection. A temporary, new reality as a counterbalance to fixed structures and collective memory. 

In Veldwerk I, Bert Villa explored border landscapes between city, industry and countryside. This research ultimately resulted in the associative publication Assembly, in which text and images paint a complex picture of the landscapes that surround us. In this way, Bert invites the viewer to listen to the environment in the same way. At the launch of the publication, Bert took an audience on a bicycle tour of the locations where he took his photographs.
 

BIO

Bert Villa (born 1991, Belgium) studied architecture at Sint-Lucas Ghent. Since 2017, he has been involved in various collectives such as Constructlab and 019, and at the architectural firm Cousée & Goris. Previously, he set up projects for Z33 in Hasselt; the Biennale of Belgium, De Koer and Gouvernement in Ghent; and The Underground School of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. In his own work, Bert plays with the instinctive omission of so-called facts and supposed truths, in order to make room for an alternative reality; often on the border between technological progress and tried and tested folk wisdom. During the PLAN B 2018 Arts Festival, Bert built Carbon: a recontextualisation of the traditional fireplace as a beacon of warmth and civilisation.

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